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Tragedy, luxuries, statues, parks, galleries
I seem to have acquired a cold since Monday, which feels extremely unfair. I have spent most of the day feeling severely spaced out and trying to convince myself that I will not actually blow my head off if I sneeze one more time. While waiting in line at the post office, dressed normally for early winter (corduroy coat, scarf, flat cap) and not capable of focusing on much of anything other than the necessities of mailing a package internationally, I completely failed to register that the postal worker behind the counter meant me when he said, "Can I help you, sir?" Then he saw the name on the customs form I had filled out and said, "Oh, sorry," and I wish I had had the presence of mind to respond in gender-confusing kind, but instead I believe I said insightfully, "I have to mail this to Canada."
The news is terrible. The news is surreally, fictionally terrible. There is a ceasefire now in Aleppo and I hope it holds; I hope that all the people who called for help are not already dead. The information on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election continues to mount and I can't figure out what politicians are doing with it—shrugging and resigning themselves to a tainted election that looks to produce a uniquely destructive administration? I'm sure there are still people all across this country who are happy for Trump's victory, however much cheating he required to obtain it, but I keep foundering on the idea of the kind of people who cheered a platform of expelling immigrants and rejoiced in a retrograde nationalist ideal being all right with proven foreign interference in the process of American democracy. Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know. You cannot believe the media. You can believe no one but Donald Trump. He has all the answers. He tells you the truth. He'll give you your heart's desire for free. Never mind history, does no one in this country know folktales? I recognize that everyone on my friendlist will have gone through this stage over the weekend and I am just behind the times, but now is when I am reading news and it is bewildering. The continued desire to keep talking about Trump as if he is still (he never was) just an ordinary candidate on track to the White House as usual. This is not usual. This is not normal. What a lousy refrain for the foreseeable future. I like my not normal in other flavors, thank you.
Things that are good—
1.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel made me cheese grits for lunch. They are a comfort food of my childhood, one of my former winter breakfasts that lapsed in recent years. Thank you for the reminder, shewhomust!
2. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016) is even better than its cover and I deeply regret that it was not published at the time of its writing, because if it had set the tone for the rest of the series, Bertha Cool—late-middle-aged, overweight, unsentimental, profane, and majestically undisturbed by other people's reactions to all of the previous—would have been one of the most enjoyably bad-ass female detectives of the twentieth century. As it was, the editor's afterword and my experience of a later book in the series suggest that after the novel was rejected, Gardner redirected the characterizations so that narrator Donald Lam emerged as the brains of the outfit and Bertha as a secondary figure. I like Donald; he is an appropriately odd-couple counterpart to Bertha, being a pint-sized ex-lawyer, not yet thirty, something of a romantic, who's about as much use where fists or guns are involved as a dishrag against a depth charge. He's a smart kid and tougher than he looks, which is why he's working for Bertha's detective agency in the first place. He also makes, in the course of The Knife Slipped, the hilariously genre-savvy mistake of figuring himself as the world-weary private eye being played for a sap by the femme fatale he loves, with the result that he almost wrecks the case trying to cover up guilt that isn't there and really confusing the girl in the meanwhile. Eventually he works his way to the truth of the crime scene, but it takes a boost from his boss who never played the sap for anyone, especially not her cheating late husband; the author of the afterword believes that, too, did not meet with Gardner's editor's approval. I agree that Donald needn't have stayed a screwup in order for the series to progress, but it's a fantastically meta way for him to be fallible and I am sorry that Gardner felt any need to diminish the force of hard-boiled, diamond-wearing DNGAF that is heavy-breasted Bertha Cool, lighting another cigarette and reminding the reader, "I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don't." At the moment I have fancast her with Hope Emerson, but please feel free to suggest anyone I've overlooked.
3. My plush Dunkleosteus terrelli arrived! In May, I backed a Kickstarter by the Paleontological Research Institute to add a plush ammonoid to their line of Paleozoic Pals. My reward level was some fossil wallpapers and a plush placoderm. On the original production schedule it would have been a birthday self-present; as it is, I think it is just generally comforting. I unwrapped it and Rob instantly and correctly exclaimed, "In the Late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious!" Personally, I think it's got a sweet face.
The news is terrible. The news is surreally, fictionally terrible. There is a ceasefire now in Aleppo and I hope it holds; I hope that all the people who called for help are not already dead. The information on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election continues to mount and I can't figure out what politicians are doing with it—shrugging and resigning themselves to a tainted election that looks to produce a uniquely destructive administration? I'm sure there are still people all across this country who are happy for Trump's victory, however much cheating he required to obtain it, but I keep foundering on the idea of the kind of people who cheered a platform of expelling immigrants and rejoiced in a retrograde nationalist ideal being all right with proven foreign interference in the process of American democracy. Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know. You cannot believe the media. You can believe no one but Donald Trump. He has all the answers. He tells you the truth. He'll give you your heart's desire for free. Never mind history, does no one in this country know folktales? I recognize that everyone on my friendlist will have gone through this stage over the weekend and I am just behind the times, but now is when I am reading news and it is bewildering. The continued desire to keep talking about Trump as if he is still (he never was) just an ordinary candidate on track to the White House as usual. This is not usual. This is not normal. What a lousy refrain for the foreseeable future. I like my not normal in other flavors, thank you.
Things that are good—
1.
derspatchel made me cheese grits for lunch. They are a comfort food of my childhood, one of my former winter breakfasts that lapsed in recent years. Thank you for the reminder, shewhomust!2. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016) is even better than its cover and I deeply regret that it was not published at the time of its writing, because if it had set the tone for the rest of the series, Bertha Cool—late-middle-aged, overweight, unsentimental, profane, and majestically undisturbed by other people's reactions to all of the previous—would have been one of the most enjoyably bad-ass female detectives of the twentieth century. As it was, the editor's afterword and my experience of a later book in the series suggest that after the novel was rejected, Gardner redirected the characterizations so that narrator Donald Lam emerged as the brains of the outfit and Bertha as a secondary figure. I like Donald; he is an appropriately odd-couple counterpart to Bertha, being a pint-sized ex-lawyer, not yet thirty, something of a romantic, who's about as much use where fists or guns are involved as a dishrag against a depth charge. He's a smart kid and tougher than he looks, which is why he's working for Bertha's detective agency in the first place. He also makes, in the course of The Knife Slipped, the hilariously genre-savvy mistake of figuring himself as the world-weary private eye being played for a sap by the femme fatale he loves, with the result that he almost wrecks the case trying to cover up guilt that isn't there and really confusing the girl in the meanwhile. Eventually he works his way to the truth of the crime scene, but it takes a boost from his boss who never played the sap for anyone, especially not her cheating late husband; the author of the afterword believes that, too, did not meet with Gardner's editor's approval. I agree that Donald needn't have stayed a screwup in order for the series to progress, but it's a fantastically meta way for him to be fallible and I am sorry that Gardner felt any need to diminish the force of hard-boiled, diamond-wearing DNGAF that is heavy-breasted Bertha Cool, lighting another cigarette and reminding the reader, "I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don't." At the moment I have fancast her with Hope Emerson, but please feel free to suggest anyone I've overlooked.
3. My plush Dunkleosteus terrelli arrived! In May, I backed a Kickstarter by the Paleontological Research Institute to add a plush ammonoid to their line of Paleozoic Pals. My reward level was some fossil wallpapers and a plush placoderm. On the original production schedule it would have been a birthday self-present; as it is, I think it is just generally comforting. I unwrapped it and Rob instantly and correctly exclaimed, "In the Late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious!" Personally, I think it's got a sweet face.
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Indeed!
(Nice icon.)
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That's all I can figure anyone is going to 'do' with it. T is for once the hopeful one and keeps telling me Obama is pressing for an investigation and the electors are calling for a report before the vote &c &c, and I just don't see how it will do any good -- the Republicans will never impeach Trump, he'll never resign, the country will go completely to hell and if we're lucky won't take the rest of the globe along with it, and apparently holding another election? or the electors voting for someone else? or even just putting everything ON HOLD until this whole horrible mess is sorted out? is unthinkable to even the liberals. Even better, once he's in office there will be even more gerrymandering and civil rights suppression, and possible mass deportations to boot, so the Democrats will go on getting more votes and fewer actual seats and the electoral college will get even more fucked. We'll be in for eight years of Trump and then probably eight years of Pence, if they bother to hold elections for the spectacle of it. Meanwhile, whatever tragedies do happen as a result of his reign, nothing's going to happen to him, or the 1% he belongs to, because nothing ever happens to them, it's the rest of the world who suffers.
I dunno, I can't be objective about it anymore. I mean there is absolute cold hard evidence from the CIA of all places that Putin deliberately sabotaged our election so Trump could be in power for the economic and political benefit of both of them contrary to the will of the US citizens. That should be enough to throw it all out in my opinion. But apparently that's impossible, or so everyone keeps telling me whenever I say "But doesn't that mean the results are wrong....?"
Also Julian Assange should be in jail for the rest of his miserable life. With no connection to the digital world whatsoever.
I was depressed and felt like my possible life and the one career I might've been good at was cut short long before this. I'm disabled, can't work, can barely stay awake for more than four to six hours at a time and sleep at least ten hours when I can't, so I have no idea what is going to happen.
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I know this is from a couple of days ago (my yesterday got eaten by writing about Dorothy Arzner, which I do not regret), but you sound like you were crashing worse than usual here; I hope things are now better if not (I wouldn't expect them to be, but you can surprise me any time you like) great.
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It's okay! I was not concerned by the action so much as the implication. I am glad you're feeling better.
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Which is why it's incomprehensible that people seem to be okay. It's not one little nitpick. Or one major sticking point. It's the whole ball of extremely icky and traceably fingerprinted all over at a distance wax.
Is it just us people here on the internet who are aware that this is not normal or okay? I don't know.
I know non-internet people who are aware that it's not normal and are not happy about it. Unfortunately none of them are politicians.
I do know that I have been consuming a lot of spiked eggnog.
At least it's the season . . .
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We do! The seams split so that we could no longer use it as a pillowcase, so we hung it on the wall as the Banner of the Cat. We are very much in favor of B. Kliban in this house. Hooray for the pillowcases your mother still has!
Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know
As it happens, it seems to me that health insurance is completely off Trump's radar right now. It's the Republicans in Congress who will seal her husband's fate.
Re: Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know
I am aware of the human capacity for cognitive dissonance: I have relatives who voted for Trump and are upset with the results and are still not able to think of belonging to or even interacting with anything other than whatever's left of the Republican Party, so far even if it literally kills them. It's just on display right now at a level that I keep reality-checking because I do not understand how it goes on. If it's a matter of investment in a story, at some point it's the story or your life and I hope that most people would choose their lives. (I'm sure many people choose the story. And if you die for it, then you become a martyr, and that becomes the next layer of the story, and there's even more reason for the next generation to cling to it rather than the truth. Myth soaks up sunk costs like nothing else.) If it's a matter of political opportunism, that's just terrible. The trouble is that right now I have no trouble believing in the primacy of terrible. I want to know what it will take to stop the freefall that isn't thousands of people dying and it is difficult to feel right now that anyone is interested in anything short of, or maybe not even.
As it happens, it seems to me that health insurance is completely off Trump's radar right now. It's the Republicans in Congress who will seal her husband's fate.
I don't view the two as entirely separate phenomena.
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I'm holding out for a coelacanth, myself. I think I've seen at least one on Amazon... but I think it would be shipped from Japan.
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It makes me very happy.
I'm holding out for a coelacanth, myself. I think I've seen at least one on Amazon... but I think it would be shipped from Japan.
Paleozoic Pals may yet produce one! The Kickstarter met its stretch goal for a new plushie. I voted for the coelecanth, anyway, along with Tiktaalik because who doesn't want a plush one of those. So keep your fingers crossed for next year.
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(I have a draft of the post on the various OK Corrals started, but I've got at least two more to watch before I finish it :-)
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Thank you! It is a delightful Dunkleosteus. I have to figure out somewhere safe to keep it where the cats cannot decide it is their favorite new toy.
(I have a draft of the post on the various OK Corrals started, but I've got at least two more to watch before I finish it :-)
God be between you and all the Western mythology you must watch.
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I often am mistaken for male, particularly in winter when my coat and hat make reasonable gender camouflage. I think my favorite one was the time a nice old British gentleman mistook me for a Mountie.
Hooray for B. Kliben, for grits, and plush dinosaurs. The world has been thoroughly populated by unreality, illogic, and horror lately. I can only hope that our anger and activism will burn as long as necessary to put the world to right again.
Feel much better soon!
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Well, I wouldn't make the grade in Return to Oz, but at least I still have my head on. Today has been more in the mode of coughing than sneezing. I wouldn't call it an improvement.
I often am mistaken for male, particularly in winter when my coat and hat make reasonable gender camouflage. I think my favorite one was the time a nice old British gentleman mistook me for a Mountie.
. . . Were you on a horse at the time?
Hooray for B. Kliben, for grits, and plush dinosaurs. The world has been thoroughly populated by unreality, illogic, and horror lately. I can only hope that our anger and activism will burn as long as necessary to put the world to right again.
Amen. I just wish it weren't necessary.
Feel much better soon!
Thank you! I'm trying. Having slept at all last night would have helped.
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I wouldn't call that an improvement either. Your poor head. I would loan you mine, but it's got issues too, and besides, if we both take off our heads at once, we'll be in Shel Silverstein territory before we know it, and not Return to Oz at all.
. . . Were you on a horse at the time?
I was not. I was rather jetlagged, having just gotten off a plane in Europe for the first time in my life (well, in the UK) and I was perched on a traffic island while
And the man asked, once I was holding his suitcase, and at least one of his legs was out of the car, "are you one of those Royal Canadian Mounted People?" and I had to at least own up to being Canadian. I seem to have misplaced the whole "get a horse" sequence. Possibly that went to my sister, or my best friend.
Amen. I just wish it weren't necessary.
Amen, selah.
Thank you! I'm trying. Having slept at all last night would have helped.
I have often wished that I could send you sleep, in a tiny package that you could open and unfold and settle over yourself like gossamer, and shake off in the morning, like a soap bubble. Sadly, they don't seem to make this product in the U.S. Perhaps we can import it from somewhere where it is more legal, and more easily obtained.
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Thank you!
I wrote to the Paleontological Research Institute to tell them it was a lovely critter.
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Bertha Cool reminds me that one Chandler -- it might be Trouble Is My Business begins with a pair of female private eyes who come off as (a) Rule 64 Nero and Archie, and (b) probably a couple. Unfortunately they decide their latest case needs a male agent, so they subcontract it to Marlowe, and never show up again. There's also supposed to be a series about a team named McDade and Alvadero -- (http://www.thrillingdetective.com/mcdade.html)she's a former circus fat lady, and she's a college-educated Mexican, and they're both extremely smart and tough -- but I've never read any. Probably should fix that.
I need to show Andrew that dunkleosteus plushie.
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Understood. I want it to be something like that, too, but I don't know how much reason I have for hope.
a pair of female private eyes who come off as (a) Rule 64 Nero and Archie, and (b) probably a couple. Unfortunately they decide their latest case needs a male agent, so they subcontract it to Marlowe, and never show up again.
Aw, man. I hope at least they had a vivid fanfic afterlife.
There's also supposed to be a series about a team named McDade and Alvadero -- she's a former circus fat lady, and she's a college-educated Mexican, and they're both extremely smart and tough -- but I've never read any. Probably should fix that.
Please report back! That sounds potentially amazing.
I need to show Andrew that dunkleosteus plushie.
Feel free. I am so happy with it.
squeee!!
Re: squeee!!
Currently it's living on top of the bookcase of pulp and mystery novels, where the cats cannot discover and play with it.
Haven't gotten mine yet.... 's OK, also getting the ammonoid plushie
Nice! I just got the prehistoric fish, but I am looking forward to purchasing the ammonoid when it becomes publicly available: my three-year-old niece is just starting to get into fossils. I wish to encourage this behavior.
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It was the mention of porridge and cheese in the same paragraph. All of a sudden I realized what I was missing.
(We do also have oats. And it's not like I can only eat one kind of cereal in the same week.)
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In a way this is the variant of "boys will be boys" attitude, which is often used to dismiss incidents of sexism, homophobia, and violence/bullying. All things we know to be wrong but if one's mental map includes the notion that "such things always happen" and "that's just people being the way they are" then one is predisposed not to get upset about it.
This is not an excuse so much as a post-hoc rationalization and it's something I'm still mulling over, but thought I'd share.
On an entirely different note, I tend to do drinks in the hotel bar on the Saturday of Arisia - kind of post-dinner and pre-evening panels/parties. If I have your email address I will be pleased to invite you; if not and you feel like stopping by just to see who this oddball is that's popped into your LJ that would be cool too.
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And the people who do get upset can be dismissed. Don't they know how the world is? Don't they know the rest of us have to live in it, too? What do they want, special exemption? And the snowflake argument starts and I want to put rocks in my snowballs.
This is not an excuse so much as a post-hoc rationalization and it's something I'm still mulling over, but thought I'd share.
No, it makes sense to me. It's a way that people think; I just don't think it's a useful way. It's one thing to say "such things always happen (and here is how we must deal with it in the meantime)." It's another thing to go on from there "and such things always will happen (so here's why it's not worth taking the time and effort to reduce them)."
If I have your email address I will be pleased to invite you; if not and you feel like stopping by just to see who this oddball is that's popped into your LJ that would be cool too.
Thank you for the information.
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I suspect many of the "boys will be boys" people would say "no" when asked, "Should that boy be allowed to bully your son?" But when considering bullying in the abstract they don't see it as important as other things. I suspect this is the sort of dichotomy that allowed them to vote for a racist, isolationist bully because that person focused their attention on other things, leaving them with the reflexive "oh people just say things" response to Trump's demagoguery.
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Thank you. The placoderm is even plusher than I was hoping.
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Possibly not this weekend, though, if you're not up to company. And have a cold. It sucks that you have to have a cold--after your already medical week--and I am sorry.
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If they ever go on sale, we need to get him one.
It sucks that you have to have a cold--after your already medical week--and I am sorry.
Thank you. I have to admit I'm not thrilled. I get to call my doctor back on Monday if it hasn't gone by then.
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Nine
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Thank you.